The funniest gag in Alan Wake is that Alan Wake is supposed to be an author of such boundless imagination that a nameless eldritch force is awakened solely by his presence and longs to use his singular talent to destroy the world or whatever, but then the excerpts of his writing that we're treated to (and there are many) are like sub-Dan Brown level hack garbage. I don't think this was intentional but I like to give Remedy the benefit of the doubt where I can. Anyway Alan Wake II better be the best fucking game of the year if it made me revisit this tedious piece of shit so I can remember the lore.

Really an ARPG that happens to have some farming in it rather than the Square Enix take on a Rune Factory-like that I expected it to be. Which would be fine, except it's not a very good ARPG. The class system is neat but actually playing it feels like an unpleasant midpoint between Dark Souls and, I don't know, Nier Automata or something. You have basic combos but actually committing to one, or using a class ability, locks you into an attack animation, but at the same time there's not much point in being patient and picking your shots Souls-style because the game doesn't really let you dodge anything anyway and you're just kind of expected to mitigate damage by eating food. Feels very sloppy.

As a farming game it seems to think the appeal of farming RPGs is entirely in doing daily chores. There's no sense of entering a community where everyone knows each other, no events to speak of (whether it be something like a town festival or really bad weather you need to prepare for), and barely any sense of the passing of seasons because each town in the game represents their own season so it can be the middle of summer but you're spending your time in the town where it's always cold and snowy. I didn't make it to winter but in spring, summer and fall my farm just kind of felt like it was in stasis.

I hung on for longer than I would have because I was told that its narrative gets weird in the back half. And it does! Just not enough that it seemed worth it to put more than the 60 hours I'd already sunk into it. I did find it kind of funny though how brazenly it lifts from a certain cult ARPG released in the last decade.

Cool music though!

Really wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did. For all the surface Game of Thrones-ness--the aesthetic, the grim tone, the "corrupt nations warring amongst each other" framework--it's really a pretty classical Final Fantasy narrative, for better and for worse. Clive, who looks so much like Generic Grizzled Video Game White Guy on the cover, ended up being one of my favorite protagonists in the entire series, his vulnerability, politeness and general good nature belying his perma-scowl and gravelly voice in a way that's remarkably endearing.

The plot's a bit stupid (and it lifts quite a bit from uh, a certain previous title that Yoshi-P has worked on and is still currently working on); pretty much everything involving the Bearers feels at least a little bit hamfisted and sometimes outright tasteless in its attempts to draw parallels to real-world bigotry. But Yoshi-P and his team understand that a good way to get someone like me hooked is to give me something of a found family to care about (a la the Scions of FFXIV), and by the end I was more attached to Clive's gang than I ever could have expected. Ultimately, with all the promo material bringing the GoT influence front and center I was afraid it would adopt Martin's brand of cynicism, but FFXVI has a remarkably soft heart at its core, and, well, it got to me.

All that said I really hope this isn't a bellwether for where the series is headed.

I was strongly encouraged by a friend to not play through any of the routes after the initial "main" one and I can already sort of see why, with how that main one ends. I'm not one of those annoying, vaguely misogynist prudes who think cis women have no business being near gay porn, but I would at least ask they learn how the plumbing works before writing about it. One of the most unintentionally goofy sex scenes I've come across in something that's otherwise phenomenally well-written.

And it really is a tremendously written visual novel, or at least the route I played is: strange, funny, eerie, and deeply sad. Its cast of characters is among the kookiest I've come across, with an admirably perverse lack of care given to making its self-involved dipshit protagonist even a little sympathetic. A real good time, at least until the dicks come out.

Awe-inspiring and also a little bit of a mess. The systems built around its physics are genuinely some of the most astonishing stuff I've ever seen in a video game. They actually like, put effort into the story they were telling here, unlike BOTW. I don't think it actually is the biggest game I've ever played, but it legitimately feels like it. An incredible achievement in a whole lot of ways. It also just kinda feels lumbering and a bit unbalanced in ways that BOTW didn't. The sage party members are legitimately bad, but you're never required to use them (except in temples) so it's never a big deal.

Feels in a lot of ways like the Majora's Mask to BOTW's Ocarina of Time--a darker, weirder, sadder sequel where the team, having nailed what they were going for in the previous game, took the opportunity to cut loose and experiment. And I happen to be the kind of Zelda fan who prefers when the series gets weird.

I may circle back around to giving this another shot but I had a really hard time squaring my love for everything that wasn't the combat with the combat, which sucks complete ass. like imagine if the controls in Souls games were half as responsive as they are and also you couldn't move the camera. and the game having bad combat would honestly be fine, i'm willing to put up with a lot if a game is at least interesting, except there's such an emphasis on it, and i don't know why when the heart of the game is so obviously in exploration and discovery. real disappointment.

The mainstream press crowed about how this dumb piece of shit is proof that Video Games Is Art and it turns out they were right, though not in the way they intended. The discourse around Infinite's release 10 years ago was the first time I'd ever really seen people who weren't just like, niche writers on the Internet applying critical thought and analysis to what a game was expressing thematically and artistically, and the way so many people saw through its pretension and moral vacuity was in fact proof that we really were collectively beginning to understand games as artistic expression, which is legitimately a very cool thing. It's too bad it had to be around one of the worst games of that generation, but you can't have everything.

Handily the best Pokemon gen since at least HeartGold/SoulSilver, and if I'm being honest the only two things holding it back from me declaring it the best core Pokemon game period are 1. the technical issues, which don't really bother me but do hold the open world back from feeling legitimately immersive, and 2. the fact that I'm playing this as a jaded 34-year-old instead of a wide-eyed 12-year-old. They managed to even get me to care about the plot, which has genuinely never happened before with a Pokemon game.

Performance issues aside, this is pretty close to the dream Pokemon game I always thought about as a kid and, after the half-assed piddly nothing that was Sword/Shield, simply assumed was beyond Game Freak's talents and resources at this point. It's imperfect, sure--it would be nice if the world felt a little less empty, and if the school Persona-lite stuff was better integrated into the core gameplay, for starters--but between this and Arceus, Pokemon feels fresh and new again in a way it hasn't in a very long time, probably over half my lifetime ago, and I'm willing to overlook quite a bit in exchange for the series no longer feeling like a fossil. It's just a great game, something I didn't think I would ever be saying about a new Pokemon gen again, and it's very frustrating that a loud corner of perpetually angry fans would apparently rather have bad Pokemon games with polish than interesting ones that happen to be rough around the edges.

Currently finishing up Violet and it's really driving home how boring and lifeless and uninspired this gen was. In retrospect it almost feels like they made the Wild Area as a proof of concept for what an open world Pokemon game could look like and then just decided to construct all of gen 8 around it as an afterthought. I missed Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and Diamond/Pearl/Platinum because they came out when I was in high school and thought I was too mature for Pokemon but Sw/Sh is pretty easily the worst gen that I've played to date.